Retail sales should rise 3.4 percent this year, down from 4.2 percent growth in 2012, as higher payroll taxes cut into discretionary spending for consumers, the world’s largest retail trade association said on Monday.

More taxes taken away from consumers means they have less to spend? Who could have seen that coming?!?

This perpetual recovery that we have supposedly been in since 2009 (Krugman says so!) has been mostly a one step forward, one step back affair, which even toddlers figure out right away isn’t a good plan for ever getting anywhere.

Stephen Kruiser is a professional comedian and writer who has also been a conservative political activist for over two decades. A co-founder of the first Los Angeles Tea Party, Kruiser often speaks to grassroots groups around America and has had the great honor of traveling around the world entertaining U.S. troops.

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1.
Katherine

Stop all forms of withholding. Make Americans write a monthly check to DC and watch the nation get conservative overnight. Problems fixed.

Yes, it was done with malice aforethought; intended to get us to live mindlessly for their “our” betterment. A Capo from a concentration camp interviewed after the war was asked why so few were needed to control so many responded, (paraphrase) They let us separate them from their children without making a fuss. We knew then we could do anything to them.

They take the first fruits of our labor and we remain silent. We should never have acquiesced to this, and should not remain silent now. So very many problems would cease to be if Americans were mindful of how much they send to DC.

You can’t conplain about the solvency of Social Security program and then attack the end of a contribution cut that was further damaging the solvency of the program. FICA is not a tax. It is a forced contributions for an annuity. If you cut contributions you should cut the annuity. To preempt the ignorant I will remind the audience that insurance companies also make payouts from current income and not capital. There is no lockbox with your name on it at Met Life either.

Personally I don’t complain about the solvency of social security… I complain about the EXISTENCE of social security. To devote such a huge, destructive chunk of the federal budget to what is essentially a ponzi scheme is nothing short of criminal.

And your comparison with private insurance doesn’t hold water. Insurance companies may make their annuity payments out of current income, but most of that income comes from investments. They’re not just paying Client A by giving him the premiums paid by Client B and Client C. And though there may not be a lockbox with your name on it down at Metlife you DO have an enforceable contract. They can’t just decide not to pay you and if they go under you have a claim on their assets. You have none of that with social security. Congress can reduce or eliminate your payments as they see fit and you can’t do one damn thing about it.

In asserting an equivalence between social security and private annuities you haven’t preempted the ignorant, you’ve demonstrated that you’re one of them.

The real difference is that standard private annuities are not indexed for inflation so you will not have person who paid little into system getting the same annuity that someone who paid a lot more. If you want to buy an indexed annuity, if they are offered, your premiums would be much higher. But you are wrong about social secruity and private insurance companies. Both use all sources of income to pay benefits. Bonds held in the social security “trust fund” pay interest. Private insurance companies also hold large amounts of government bonds. If Obama does drive the federal deficit to the point of insolvency then the federal debt held by private insurance companies is no less insecure than the IOUs owed to the Social Security system. In fact they are probably less secure. The government will take care of its own needs no matter who is running things, liberal, Conservative or Libertarian, before it takes care of the private sector.

Let me give you some advice. Before you call someone ignorant, look in the mirror.

An annuity is your choice and your property. In contrast, the Supreme Court has ruled that Americans have no enforceable claims on the Social Security system — that Congress may elect to reduce payments arbitrarily, even to zero, and we “contributors” will have no recourse against it.

I don’t expect anything from Social Security. I’d rather keep my current earnings; let Washington’s Ponzi scheme do without them.

You’re right. There is no obligation for the government to pay Social Security but only a few people actually realize this. It would be political suicide though for politicians not to do so, unless there were enough young voters who had never paid into Social Security and/or were willing to stick it to the elderly so they, the young, could get that free stuff.

Math doesn’t care about what is or isn’t political suicide. Math always wins in the end. And the math on social security is this: there are too many people at the top of the pyramid and not enough people at the bottom. Sooner or later (probably sooner) the only way to maintain this absurd program is going to be severe cuts in other parts of the budget or tax hikes that will further damage our economy.

The Dow Jones has gone from 8,000 to 14,000 and the price of gold has gone from $850/oz. to $1650/oz.. Therefore, relative to the value of gold, the stock market has actually gone down over the last four years. Unfortunately, the average voter with college credentials doesn’t know that.

Gold doesn’t pay dividends or interest, stocks and bonds do. The only way to get an income stream from gold is to liquidate it. I think you’re failing to take that into account.

It’s a good idea to have some gold in your portfolio because diversification is a sound investment practice. But you can’t dismiss any asset class just because some other asset outperformed it over some arbitrary time period.

Some stocks and bonds pay dividends and some don’t. I wasn’t commenting on income stream or giving investment advice. I was making the point that the stock market’s real value hasn’t increased over the last four years.